Hi, I'm Areej

Here's my story

 I’ve had a hearing loss since the age of around 4. The cause for it is still unknown.  I often felt very isolated growing-up, but I’ve never felt as isolated as I do today. Due to COVID-19 everyone’s now wearing face masks and majority of the time I have no clue what people are saying because I lip-read. It seems as if the hearing loss world has been forgotten and many people don’t seem to understand the challenges that we face. My goal in life has always been to change the way hearing loss is perceived. Like many people with disabilities, I worked hard to overcome my challenges; I was able to go to university and to become a computer science educator. Now, despite the negatives of the pandemic, there seems to also be a positive, in that it allowed me the time to focus on my goal in life.  

In July 2020 I launched an Instagram page @hearareej and my inbox started flooding with touching messages from all over the world. It occurred to me that I’m not the only one going through all these struggles and I’m not the only one trying to achieve this goal. There are approximately 466 million people around the world going through the same challenges as me.  

 In December 2020 I formed a team who wanted to support me with achieving my goal and together we’ve created this Hear Areej Crowdfunding Campaign. As part of this campaign, we want to bring you a solution to help bridge the gap between the hearing and deaf communities. Our app, Ear to Ear will allow someone with a hearing loss to input their audiogram and to use it to process the sound of something playing on their phone to the level of their hearing loss and then output the sounds in the way the person with their hearing loss hears it.  This will help the others understand what it's like to have the hearing loss that their child, student, sibling, or patient may be experiencing.

In addition, we want to use the fund to normalize the way hearing devices are perceived by making them more fashionable and trendier using accessories everyone could wear.  

Together we can do all of this! With your help, donations and sponsorship we can guarantee you that this campaign will support and inspire people with hearing loss by making them feel heard. 

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